Don't Design Your Emails
Stumbled upon an interesting article from Greg Kogan where he discussed the false necessity or designing emails. To be honest it can be hurting your business as well!
Designing emails is a time consuming process, mostly because:
1. Email tools/clients are inconsistent in how they render HTML and CSS
2. Half of all emails are opened on mobile devices (here's a study from Litmus)
3. Email require their own flavor of HTML and CSS
4. There are email templates available, but they don’t eliminate design work
5. The design is one more thing that needs to be approved
Points 1-4 are a pain in the especially especially to a non-designing person (of which I am guilty). And no, those Mailchimp templates aren't going to cut it...
Writing plain emails is not necessarily a bad idea, since:
1. Professionals (ie, corporate buyers) care more about substance and valuable information than pretty designs
2. People get dozens of pretty newsletters per day and perhaps a plain email would stand out
3. "Ugly" can be effective
Greg went on to test Plain vs Designed Emails on a newsletter send to 24,000+ recipients (using a template from Mailchimp, ah!).
The plain email—which took no time to design or code—was opened by more recipients and had 2.3x more clicks than the designed email.
The same results were found in user onboarding emails, cold sales, webinar invitations, newsletters, etc etc.
The plain, unstyled emails resulted in more opens, clicks, replies, and conversions, every time.
According to Greg theere are a couple of reasons for lain emails to work better:
1. They’re less likely to be caught in spam filters
2. They’re less likely to go into the “Promotions” tab in Gmail
3. They don’t look like advertisements
4. They feel more personal
Here you can read the full post: "Don't Design Your Emails"
What about you? Do you send plain text emails to your customers or do you also focus on getting the best design done?
Are you spending a lot of time designing them and wasting your time in trivialities?
And if you do write plain text emails, are you thinking of switching to design emails?
Designing emails is a time consuming process, mostly because:
1. Email tools/clients are inconsistent in how they render HTML and CSS
2. Half of all emails are opened on mobile devices (here's a study from Litmus)
3. Email require their own flavor of HTML and CSS
4. There are email templates available, but they don’t eliminate design work
5. The design is one more thing that needs to be approved
Points 1-4 are a pain in the especially especially to a non-designing person (of which I am guilty). And no, those Mailchimp templates aren't going to cut it...
Writing plain emails is not necessarily a bad idea, since:
1. Professionals (ie, corporate buyers) care more about substance and valuable information than pretty designs
2. People get dozens of pretty newsletters per day and perhaps a plain email would stand out
3. "Ugly" can be effective
Greg went on to test Plain vs Designed Emails on a newsletter send to 24,000+ recipients (using a template from Mailchimp, ah!).
The plain email—which took no time to design or code—was opened by more recipients and had 2.3x more clicks than the designed email.
The same results were found in user onboarding emails, cold sales, webinar invitations, newsletters, etc etc.
The plain, unstyled emails resulted in more opens, clicks, replies, and conversions, every time.
According to Greg theere are a couple of reasons for lain emails to work better:
1. They’re less likely to be caught in spam filters
2. They’re less likely to go into the “Promotions” tab in Gmail
3. They don’t look like advertisements
4. They feel more personal
Here you can read the full post: "Don't Design Your Emails"
What about you? Do you send plain text emails to your customers or do you also focus on getting the best design done?
Are you spending a lot of time designing them and wasting your time in trivialities?
And if you do write plain text emails, are you thinking of switching to design emails?
20+ Years Exp . . . . . .